[Gimp-print-devel] Release strategy

[Robert L K. <rl...@al...>]

I'm a bit undecided about what our best release strategy might be, so
I'd like to ask for some opinions here.

We're getting some attention on gimp-developer (in particular, the
note I'm enclosing at the end of this one).  I happen to like
Sourceforge as a hosting service, but that's not the point -- Federico
likes this thing.

Currently, 3.0.3 is in the Gimp CVS tree, and I've asked Olof to put
3.0.5 in there.  My general impression is that 3.0.5 (or any future
bug release based on that) is what will go out with Gimp 1.2.  Of
course, if that gets delayed enough, and there's really heavy demand
for newer printers and our code's in good shape, we might have 3.2
ready, but I kinda hope not (in other words, I hope that the Gimp 1.2
goes out soon).

However, I think that once things stabilize a bit more -- we get at
least some of the newer Epson printers working, and/or the Canon
stuff, or something else significant -- that we should do a 3.1
release as quickly as practicable.  This will follow the usual Linux
kernel convention; odd-number minor versions are development,
even-numbered ones are stable.  I'd like to have something we can put
up here, and announce on Freshmeat and Appwatch, and start getting
some more feedback.  However, in order for that to be useful, we need
some stuff:

1) The current makefile situation is basically silly.  It's just the
   generated makefiles, plus a handcrafted one I threw together.  So
   we probably need some kind of configure script (which seems like
   overkill in a way, but maybe this project isn't so tiny after all),
   or the like.

2) There's no significant user level documentation: what the various
   controls do, how to build it, tuning it for various printers, how
   to support a new printer maybe....  The README that I wrote is a
   joke that I should be ashamed to be associated with :-)

3) Web site: the current situation (my personal page) is purely a
   stopgap.  Sourceforge provides a very nice web hosting environment,
   with at least PHP.  I might need to give someone the appropriate
   bits; I'll take as an action item learning how to do that (give
   somebody the bits).

4) Decide if we want to ship any prepackaged binaries (the obvious is
   Red Hat RPM's, but one of our group who's having some problems with
   his Sourceforge account but who wants to join, Daniel Egger, works
   for SuSE, and I run SuSE at home, so we might have some controversy
   there :-) )

Right now, it looks like the following people are working on the
following things:

* Eric Sharkey: escp2 emulator (a "soft printer" of a kind?)

* Nicholas Piper's interested in working on the web site.  That's one
  of the release tasks.

* Karl Heinz Kremer is looking at debugging the Epson Stylus 740
  driver (which will give us the key to a number of other current
  generation printers).

* Andy ??? is working on Canon support.

* Me -- ???  I've been doing odds and ends, working on the
  stc440/640/740/900 and stp750/1200 support and such.

So any volunteers?

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rl...@al...>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lp...@uu...

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton